Can you catch a cold from a chill? Some call it an old wives tale, but if I know anything about wives (and moms), it's that they’re always right…
Let’s think it over.
Say you’re leaving swimming lessons in December, aka: a cesspool of fecal matter, bacteria, and snotty children. You’re also 5 years old and the stress of kindergarten is just too much.
Now you run to the car with a head of wet hair, refusing a hat - because "I'm fine moooom".
Your body is already working hard sorting through all the germs at the pool, the sneeze you took to the face from Sneezy Sally at school today, the exhaustion of your little brother's most recent sleep regression, and did I mention the kindy-STRESS??
Now you've caught a chill.
Maybe you'll be fine.
Or maybe that exposure to a chill caused your body to drop what it was doing to focus on keeping you warm. All of a sudden, the defences are down, the gates are open, those opportunistic bugs latch on…
Boom - you're just another snotty nosed kid.
Okay - story time aside: the point I want to make is that illness is a product of exposure AND susceptibility.
The chill didn’t cause the cold, but it may have made you more susceptible to the bacteria ALREADY at play within your body.
You need the virus AND the suitable host.
The sun AND the pale skin.
The feeble growing bones AND the fearless tree climber.
Exposure AND Susceptibility
If we all carried the same susceptibility, every exposure would produce illness: we would ALL get the annual flu.
To an extent, we can control how we manage our susceptibility to illness by managing stressors in our life. We can…
Go to therapy to manage mental health
Eat nourishing, balancing foods
Practice good hygiene
Move our body regularly
Foster healthy relationships
Learn to say “no” to manage schedules
But we all inevitably still fall ill from time to time! The difference between health and not; is our recovery: do you heal up in a few days, or does it knock you down for weeks, turn into bronchitis, put you on antibiotics?
When illness happens, we can use Homeopathy to naturally stimulate healing in the body. This helps the body process the illness more efficiently (1) and reduce the number of complications and recurrent infections (2).
Homeopathy will never shy away from the causes of symptoms reported by a patient! Some remedies even have these "old wives tales" as causes written in the books. Just like the story of the Grief Triggered Cold, colds can be triggered by:
Ailments from a hair cut (getting the head wet): Belladonna
Ailments from a cold wind: Aconite, Bryonia, Hepar Sulph
Ailments from sitting on wet ground: Nux Vomica, Arsenicum, Dulcamara, Rhus-tox, Silica (I've prescribed on this one, worked like a gem!)
Ailments from cold wet weather: Dulcamara, Gelsemium, Phytolacca
So it's not just bacteria, it's not just washing your hands; susceptibility crosses all kinds of body systems! Do any of those old wives tales apply to you? Where is your susceptibility letting you down?
Address your stress, reduce susceptibility, heal chronic illness with Homeopathy and then breeze by all those Sneezy Sally's this fall with ease!
In good health,
Paula
Resources:
(1) Chakraborty,P.S.; Lamba,C.D.; Nayak,D.; John,M.D.; Sarkar,D.B.; Poddar,A.; Arya,J.S.; Raju,K.; Vivekanand,K.; Singh,H.B.K.; Baig,H.; Prusty,A.K.; Singh,V., Nayak,C. Effect of individualized homoeopathic treatment in influenza like illness: A multicenter, single blind, randomized, placebo controlled study. IJRH 7(1): 22-30.
(2) Trichard M, Chaufferin G, Nicoloyannis N: Pharmacoeconomic comparison between homeopathic and antibiotic treatment strategies in recurrent acute rhinopharyngitis in children. Homeopathy 2005;94:3-9.
